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By manufacturing a never-ending stream of crises, a corrupt oligarchy can prolong its rule indefinitely.8
care of the elderly will probably be one of the fastest-growing sectors in the human labor market.
The U.S. armed forces need thirty people to operate every unmanned Predator or Reaper drone flying over Syria, while analyzing the resulting harvest of information occupies at least eighty people more.
the richest one hundred people together own more than the poorest four billion.1
Governments can tax carbon emissions, add the cost of externalities to the price of oil and gas, adopt stronger environmental regulations, cut subsidies to polluting industries, and incentivize the switch to renewable energy. They can also invest more money in researching and developing revolutionary eco-friendly technologies, in a kind of ecological Manhattan Project. The internal combustion engine is to be thanked for many of the advancements of the last 150 years, but if we are to keep a stable physical and economic environment, it must now be retired and substituted by new technologies
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Like the United States, China, Germany, Japan, and Iran, Israel seems to understand that in the twenty-first century the most successful strategy is to sit on the fence and let others do the fighting for you.
When a thousand people believe some made-up story for one month, that’s fake news. When a billion people believe it for a thousand years, that’s a religion,
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Once personal identities and entire social systems are built on top of a story, it becomes unthinkable to doubt it, not because of the evidence supporting it, but because its collapse will trigger a personal and social cataclysm.
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The Sabbath starts at sunset on Friday and lasts until sunset on Saturday, and in between Orthodox Jews refrain from almost any kind of work, including even tearing toilet paper from a roll in the lavatory. (There has been some discussion of this among the most learned rabbis,
who concluded that tearing toilet paper would break the Sabbath taboo; consequently, devout Jews who want to wipe their bottoms on the Sabbath have to prepare a stash of pre-torn toilet paper in advance.)14
